The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 12

"It was Harry's father."

"Oh!" she said, with a grimace. "I am sorry I was so nice to him."

What the deuce am I to do with her?

I lectured her for a quarter of an hour on the ethics of the situation.

I think I only succeeded in giving her the impression that I was in a bad temper. So much did I sympathise with Harry that I forbore to acquaint her with the fact that he was a married man when he enticed her away from Alexandretta.

CHAPTER VI

June 1st

Sebastian Pasquale dined with me this evening. Antoinette, forgetful of idolatrous practices, devoted the concentration of her being to the mysteries of her true religion. The excellence of the result affected Pasquale so strongly that with his customary disregard of convention he insisted on Antoinette being summoned to receive his congratulations.

He rose, made her a bow as if she were a Marquise of pre-revolutionary days.

"It is a meal," said he, bunching up his fingers to his mouth and kissing them open, "that one should have taken not sitting, but kneeling."

"You stole that from Heine," said I, when the enraptured creature had gone, "and you gave it out to Antoinette as if it were your own."

"My good Ordeyne," said he, "did you ever hear of a man giving anything authentic to a woman?"

"You know much more about the matter than I do," I replied, and Pasquale laughed.

It has been a pleasure to see him again--a creature of abounding vitality whom time cannot alter. He is as lithe-limbed as when he was a boy, and as lithe-witted. I don't know how his consciousness could have arrived at appreciation of Antoinette's cooking, for he talked all through dinner, giving me an account of his mirific adventures in foreign cities. Among other things, he had been playing juvenile lead, it appears, in the comic opera of Bulgarian politics. I also heard of the Viennese dancer. My own little chronicle, which he insisted on my unfolding, compared with his was that of a caged canary compared with a sparrowhawk's. Besides, I am not so expansive as Pasquale, and on certain matters I am silent. He also gesticulates freely, a thing which is totally foreign to my nature. As Judith would say, he has a temperament. His moustaches curl fiercely upward until the points are nearly on a level with his flashing dark eyes. Another point of dissimilarity between us is that he seems to have been poured molten into his clothes, whereas mine hang as from pegs clumsily arranged about my person. By no conceivable freak of outer circ.u.mstance could I have the adventures of Pasquale.

And yet he thinks them tame! Lord! If I found myself hatching conspiracies in Sofia on a nest made of loaded revolvers, I should feel that the wild whirl of Bedlam had broken loose around me.

"But man alive!" I cried. "What in the name of tornadoes do you want?"

"I want to fight," said he. "The earth has grown too grey and peaceful.

Life is anaemic. We need colour--good red splashes of it--good wholesome bloodshed."

Said I, "All you have to do is to go into a Berlin cafe and pull the noses of all the lieutenants you see there. In that way you'll get as much gore as your heart could desire."

"By Jove!" said he, springing to his feet. "What a cause for a man to devote his life to--the extermination of Prussian lieutenants!"

I leaned back in my arm-chair--it was after dinner--and smiled at his vehemence. The ordinary man does not leap about like that during digestion.

"You would have been happy as an Uscoque," said I. (I have just finished the prim narrative.)

"What's that?" he asked. I told him.

"The interesting thing about the Uscoques," I added, "is that they were a Co-operative Pirate Society of the sixteenth century, in which priests and monks and greengrocers and women and children--the general public, in fact, of Senga--took shares and were paid dividends. They were also a religious people, and the setting out of the pirate fleet at the festivals of Easter and Christmas was attended by ecclesiastical ceremony. Then they scoured the high seas, captured argosies, murdered the crews--their only weapons were hatchets and daggers and arquebuses--landed on undefended sh.o.r.es, ravaged villages and carried off comely maidens to replenish their stock of womenkind at home. They must have been a live lot of people."

"What a second-hand old brigand you are," cried Pasquale, who during my speech had been examining the carpet by the side of his chair.

I laughed. "Hasn't a phase of the duality of our nature ever struck you? We have a primary or everyday nature--a thing of habit, tradition, circ.u.mstance; and we also have a secondary nature which clamours for various sensations and is quite contented with vicarious gratification.

There are delicately fibred novelists who satisfy a sort of secondary Berserkism by writing books whose pages reek with bloodshed. The most placid, benevolent, gold-spectacled paterfamilias I know, a man who thinks it cruel to eat live oysters, has a curious pa.s.sion for crime and gratifies it by turning his study into a _musee maccabre_ of murderers'

relics. From the thumb-joint of a notorious criminal he can savour exquisitely morbid emotions, while the blood-stains on an a.s.sa.s.sin's knife fill him with the delicious l.u.s.t of slaughter. In the same way predestined spinsters obtain vicarious enjoyment of the tender pa.s.sion by reading highly coloured love-stories."

"Just as that philosophical old stick, Sir Marcus Ordeyne, dus from this sort of thing," said Pasquale.

And he fished from the side of his chair, and held up by the tip of a monstrous heel, the most audacious, high-instepped, red satin slipper I ever saw.

I eyed the thing with profound disgust. I would have given a hundred pounds for it to have vanished. In its red satin essence it was reprehensible, and in its feminine a.s.sertion it was compromising.

How did it come there? I conjectured that Carlotta must have been trespa.s.sing in the drawing-room and dropped it, Cinderella-like, in her flight, when she heard me enter the house before dinner.

Pasquale held it up and regarded me quizzically. I pretend to no austerity of morals; but a burglar unjustly accused of theft suffers acuter qualms of indignation than if he were a virtuous person.

I regretted not having asked Pasquale to dinner at the club. I particularly did not intend to explain Carlotta to Pasquale. In fact, I see no reason at all for me to proclaim her to my acquaintance. She is merely an accident of my establishment.

I rose and rang the bell.

"That slipper," said I, "does not belong to me, and it certainly ought not to be here."

Pasquale surrendered it to my outstretched hand.

"It must fit a remarkably pretty foot," said he.

"I a.s.sure you, my dear Pasquale," I replied dryly, "I have never looked at the foot that it may fit." Nor had I. A row of pink toes is not a foot.

"Stenson," said I, when my man appeared, "take this to Miss Carlotta and say with my compliments she should not have left it in the drawing-room."

Stenson, thinking I had rung for whisky, had brought up decanter and gla.s.ses. As he set the tray upon the small table, I noticed Pasquale look with some curiosity at my man's impa.s.sive face. But he said nothing more about the slipper. I poured out his whisky and soda. He drank a deep draught, curled up his swaggering moustache and suddenly broke into one of his disconcerting peals of laughter.

"I haven't told you of the Grefin von Wentzel; I don't know what put her into my head. There has been nothing like it since the world began. Mind you--a real live aristocratic Grefin with a hundred quarterings!"

He proceeded to relate a most scandalous, but highly amusing story. An amazing, incredible tale; but it seemed familiar.

"That," said I, at last, "is incident for incident a scene out of _L'Histoire Comique de Francion._"

"Never heard of it," said Pasquale, flashing.

"It was the first French novel of manners published about 1620 and written by a man called Sorel. I don't dream of accusing you of plagiarism, my dear fellow--that's absurd. But the ridiculous coincidence struck me. You and the Grefin and the rest of you were merely reenacting a three hundred year old farce."

"Rubbish!" said Pasquale.

"I'll show you," said I.

After wandering for a moment or two round my shelves, I remembered that the book was in the dining-room. I left Pasquale and went downstairs.

I knew it was on one of the top shelves near the ceiling. Now, my dining-room is lit by one shaded electrolier over the table, so that the walls of the room are in deep shadow. This has annoyed me many times when I have been book-hunting. I really must have some top lights put in. To stand on a chair and burn wax matches in order to find a particular book is ignominious and uncomfortable. The successive illumination of four wax matches did not shed itself upon _L'Histoire Comique de Francion_.

If there is one thing that frets me more than another, it is not to be able to lay my hand upon a book. I knew Francion was there on the top shelves, and rather than leave it undiscovered, I would have spent the whole night in search. I suppose every one has a harmless lunacy. This is mine. I must have hunted for that book for twenty minutes, pulling out whole blocks of volumes and peering with lighted matches behind, until my hands were covered with dust. At last I found it had fallen to the rear of a ragged regiment of French novels, and in triumph I took it to the area of light on the table and turned up the scene in question.

Keeping my thumb in the place I returned to the drawing-room.